Coma (2024)

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There was a lot of understandable pushback against the initial wave of “pandemic cinema” that was made during the first couple years of COVID-19, movies that distilled the mood & setting of our global lockdown into the same smartphone video diaries and Zoom meeting windows that we were already submerged in outside of The Movies anyway.  A lot of the resistance to that iconography from audiences & critics alike was just fatigue with the cheapness & smallness of that era in image production, but it was always couched in a concern that in the long term even the best pandemic movies were going to be instantly dated and, thus, disposable.  Betrand Bonello’s Coma defies that line of criticism by expanding the scope of lockdown-era doldrums as a symptom of a larger global illness, one that’s now persisted a half-decade beyond the initial COVID-19 outbreak.  It’s been nearly five years since the earliest COVID lockdowns and the world still feels like it hasn’t broken the spell we fell under then; we’re all still sleeping under the same weighted blanket of dread & futility.  That’s bad news for our collective mental health, but it’s great for the thematic shelf life of Coma, which finally went into wide release in 2024 after premiering at European film festivals two long, grueling years earlier.

Coma is a multimedia experiment in which Bonello attempts to relive the early lockdown days of the pandemic through his teenage daughter’s eyes.  A five-minute intro directly addresses the teen in subtitles without accompanying audio, urging her to not “surrender to the current mood,” because he believes things will eventually get better if we survive long enough to see it.  The drama that follows is mostly confined to a teen girl’s bedroom, with an actress playing a fictionalized version of his child (Louise Labèque, notably of Bonello’s Zombi Child).  She reaches out to peers through Zoom & FaceTime calls—at one point organizing a group-chat ranking of history’s greatest serial killers—but for the most part she’s tasked with entertaining herself in isolation.  She plays with Barbie dolls the way an 18-year-old would, imagining them in salacious soap opera sex scandals and feeding them outrageous dialogue from internet sources like Trump’s Twitter scroll.  She obsesses over the New Age musings of a social media influencer called Patricia Coma (Julia Faure, soon to appear in Bonello’s The Beast), who seems wise & poised until it becomes apparent that she’s suffering the same existential malaise as her followers.  The room alternates between rotoscope animation, Blair Witch found-footage nightmares set in a limbo-like “Free Zone” between worlds, paranoiac surveillance footage, and sponcon commercials for a pointless, existential memory game called The Revelator.  The entire movie is just the daily toiling of a teenager who passes her time “doing nothing much,” and the oppressive listlessness of it all is suffocating.

Bonello is mostly being playful here, and most of the appeal of the movie is in watching an accomplished filmmaker daydream in internet language, mentally drifting from the boredom of modern life.  Still, there is a heartfelt urgency in his appeal to his daughter to remain resilient despite the great Enshitification of everything, to the point where the movie is less about her interior response to the lockdown than it is about his own anxieties about having created a young child in such grim, impotent times.  In pandemic cinema terms, the result lands somewhere between the vulnerable earnestness of Bo Burnham’s Inside and the digital-age terror of the screenlife horror Host.  It’s the same push-and-pull tension between dread and romantic idealism in Bonello’s follow-up, The Beast, except that this time he’s actively fighting to not let the dread win.  Coma finds Bonello desperately searching for hope in an increasingly isolating dead-end world, because he has to believe his child is not going to suffer through The End.  The real horror of it all, of course, is that no one ever imagined the apocalypse would be this much of a bore.  As a species, we’ve never been lonelier or more useless than we are right now, and the first year of COVID lockdowns was only the start of that cultural decomposition.  I wish this movie had aged poorly in the past couple years, but unfortunately it’s still painfully relevant.

-Brandon Ledet

Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (2024)

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It’s likely cliché to describe any movie’s editing style as being similar to jazz, but in the case of Soundtrack to a Coup d’État the descriptor is literal.  The anxious sounds & stylish block text of vintage jazz albums overlay news-report propaganda clips for 150 relentless minutes in this essay-style documentary film, which covers the CIA’s efforts to rebrand the Cold War as a “Cool War” by deploying popular jazz musicians to distract from its conspiratorial overthrow of the Congolese government.  While political figures of the era as formidable & dissonant as Nikita Khrushchev, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Malcolm X weigh in on the UN machinations that led to the CIA’s conspiracy to assassinate Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, the soundtrack to that coup is provided by formidable & dissonant jazz greats of the era: Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Charles Mingus, and, most improbably, Louis Armstrong.  That soundtrack is not a formalistic choice made by director Johan Grimonprez so much as it is the core of his subject.  He details how those musicians were manipulated into working as semi-official “jazz ambassadors” for Black American culture in African nations that recently joined the UN, and how those ambassadors of Cool were used to distract from and cover for the planned execution of a newly sovereign foreign leader. 

There’s a sharp specificity to this doc’s subject, walking the audience through how African nations newly inducted into the United Nations were seen as a threat to be squashed by paranoid US leadership.  Their power within the UN as a young, organized voting block was especially threatening to the US government’s interests, since it relied on those nations remaining colonized so they could be mined for uranium supplies in the ongoing nuclear Cold War against the Communist Bloc.  Each subversive maneuver to ensure Belgium’s continued rule over the Congo is thoroughly documented in the onscreen text that interrupts the archival clips, often with page numbers & footnotes to encourage further research on your own time.  What Khrushchev describes as the “cacophony” of jazz guides the everything-goes, free-association editing style of that archival footage, so that the film ends up snapshotting the greater context of late-50s & early-60s global culture outside its duty to detail the step-by-step progress of its titular coup.  By the time Khrushchev is making jokes about visiting Disney World in a press conference attended by Marilyn Monroe, it plays like an alternate version of Joe Dante’s The Movie Orgy made for lefty academics: an impressive feat of politically fueled editing-room mania that captures & compresses the moral & political rot of an entire era.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’État‘s focus on the CIA’s appropriation & manipulation of Black American artists recalls a few other recent documentaries about the politics of Black artistic life in the US, namely Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, and I Am Not Your Negro.  It distinguishes itself from that cluster of radical docs by slightly shifting focus away from Civil Rights clashes of the 1960s to a different form of racist US state violence, but it’s still racist US state violence all the same.  Grimonprez uses a key Malcolm X clip to link the two struggles, in which the activist encourages his audience to get angrier about the US’s violence abroad instead of just the Civil Rights struggle at home, emphasizing that foreign governments are dropping American bombs on Americans’ behalf.  All efforts to de-colonize are worth supporting, but it’s especially egregious to ignore the ones suppressed by bombs bearing your country’s name.  That line of thought has obvious current relevance in the continued bombing of Gaza by the Israeli military—backed by US weapons supplies—resonating just as loudly as the continued cultural racism of the US and the continued, aggressive unpredictability of jazz.  It’s a documentary about a very specific political moment in time, but the global fight for post-colonial freedom smashes through that temporal window.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Batman and Superman – Battle of the Super Sons (2022)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.

Of all of the films on this list, this was the one I was least looking forward to. The few clips that I saw prior to my screening did not endear me to its 3D animation style, and it seemed squarely aimed at a child audience based on the premise alone. What this ended up being was much better than I expected, even if its PG-13 rating is a little baffling. 

Jonathan Kent (Jack Dylan Grazer) is about to turn twelve, and is old enough to start to resent the frequent absences of his journalist father, Clark (Travis Willingham), despite frequent lectures from his mother Lois (Laura Bailey) about the importance of the fourth estate. When dear old dad misses Jonathan’s baseball game on his birthday, the boy broods in his room and runs from his father when he does come home, taking off into a cornfield before his emotional stress gets the better of him and he manifests heat vision. Hiding in the barn afterward, his father reveals to him for the first time that he’s not always off chasing stories, but averting tsunamis and stopping falling space debris, because pops is Superman. Jonathan is delighted at this news (despite, like many children, having a preference for the “cooler” Batman). After a touching father-and-son flight around the world in the vein of Aladdin’s “A Whole New World” musical sequence, the two go to Gotham, where Superman introduces his son to Batman (Troy Baker) and the latter’s own son, Damian/Robin (Jack Griffo). There’s immediate friction between the elitist Damian and “farm boy” Jonathan, and their conflict belies Damian’s own insecurities, specifically that the Teen Titans don’t want him because of his tendencies toward both violence and lone-wolfism, rejecting him from the team. When an interstellar invading force assimilates huge swathes of the earth’s population, including the Justice League and the Titans, it’s up to the boys to put aside their differences and save both their dads and the world. 

Strangely, I had an easier time adjusting to the animation style here than I have in the “Tomorrowverse” movies, perhaps because these character models don’t constantly call to mind Adult Swim shows of a bygone era. It’s certainly not up to something like Pixar’s output, but it’s pretty decent, if occasionally wonky. I don’t think we ever see anyone close the front door of the Kent farmhouse, as characters often walk in and leave the door wide open while they have a conversation until the scene ends, so it really does seem like everyone here was raised in the proverbial barn. There are even scenes that were rather impressive, most notably the scene in which Green Arrow, bow cocked, searches the JL’s “Watchtower” satellite for a potential invader, as there’s a lot of fun rotation around the character and the movement of both model and lighting was effectively moody. There are also several scenes of characters walking out of dark shadows to reveal that they’ve been taken over by Starro spores that reminded me of one of my all-time favorite comfort Halloween watches, The Faculty, and that always gets points with me. 

Characterwise, I appreciated that this film had one of the most infuriatingly unlikeable versions of Damian Wayne to date, and that his character arc over the course of this one moves him to a more sympathetic place, which was impressive. When we first meet him, he’s snide and condescending while Bruce stands by embarrassed, apologizing for the fact that his spawn is a bratty little edgelord. He even kicks Jonathan over the edge of one of the many non-OSHA-compliant platforms in the Batcave as a “test” to see if he can get the other boy’s flight power to activate in a traumatic situation (it does not work, and Jonathan is almost smashed to death on stalacmites). His decision to head straight to Jonathan’s school and recruit him to his “save the dads” mission is pragmatic, but also speaks to his desire to prove that he can be a team player. For his part, Jonathan himself is in a meeting with the principal following an altercation with a bully named Melvin; the school administrator tells Jonathan that Melvin is troubled and that if Jonathan can extend the other boy a little grace and look past his harsh exterior, people like Melvin can be the most loyal friend one can ask for. This doesn’t really seem to be true in the case of Melvin (that kid’s a little asshole), but it does echo through his scenes with Damian, as Jonathan is able to win him over through his own clever thinking and spirit of determination. It’s not the most nuanced or original storytelling, but it’s not talking down to its audience. 

Speaking of which, I’m not really sure who this film is supposed to be for. I mentioned that PG-13 rating above, and for most of the runtime, I was hard-pressed to think of why that might be the case. Not every movie that’s about children is for children, obviously. No child should see Come and See or Graveyard of the Fireflies before they’re old enough to process what they’re seeing. This, however, definitely has the air of being made for a younger audience than these movies are normally suited for. In fact, the moment that a character said “damn,” I was a little shocked, as Super Sons had theretofore been so … family-friendly? The plot point about young Jonathan feeling ignored by his father because he missed the kid’s baseball game is a cliche lifted straight out of Hook, and both Damian and Jonathan’s playground insults are feeble in a way that couldn’t possibly interest an adult audience but might, perhaps, pass muster with a child. I found myself surprisingly touched by all the time that Clark and Jonathan spend together in Act I, but it’s not sophisticated, adult stuff; it’s for kids. After the midpoint, however, things start to get a little more violent, as if the film was lulling you into a false sense of security before moving on to Starro’s little seastar-with-an-eye things horribly emerging from characters’ mouths and, in the finale, all of those eyes bursting bloodily when the hive mind is defeated. I’m not sure what to make of this, honestly, since it takes what is clearly a PG family movie into something that’s more in line with what the standard audience of these movies would expect, but I find it hard to imagine them not being bored with the film’s more squeaky-clean daycare-safe first half. Ultimately, it’s pretty decent, if tonally uneven, and for someone who normally rolls his eyes at stories about fathers and sons, I found this story inoffensive and occasionally tender. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Drive (1997)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, Britnee, James, and Hanna discuss the 1997 DTV actioner Drive, recommended by a listener for its “transcendently unhinged Brittany Murphy performance.”

00:00 Welcome
03:38 Drive (1997)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Anora and Her Friends

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Sean Baker’s time is here.  After nailing down his gig-labor docufiction style in the 2004 food-delivery tragedy Take Out and then applying it to a long string of sex-industry dramas in the couple decades since, Baker has finally earned his moment in the prestige-circuit spotlight.  Earlier breakthroughs like Tangerine & The Florida Project perfectly calibrated his caustically funny, soberingly traumatic storytelling style in his best work to date, but he emerged from those triumphs recognized as a name to watch rather than one of the modern greats.  He’s been recalibrating in the years since, going full heel in his deliberately unlovable black comedy Red Rocket before face-turning to the opposite extreme in his latest work, Anora.  Clearly, Baker has decided he wants audiences to love him again, and it’s impressive to see him swing so wildly in tone between his last two features without losing his voice.  Anora is the feel-good sweet counterbalance to the feel-bad sour Sean Baker of Red Rocket.  Both are equally funny & frantic, but only one is affable enough to set the filmmaker up for a Best-Picture Oscar run after taking home the top prize at Cannes.  It’s his time.

The surprising thing about Anora’s critical success is that it’s such a dutiful continuation of the work Baker’s already been doing for years – just with an extra dash of sugar to help sweeten the bitter.  Mikey Madison stars as the titular erotic dancer, another trapped-by-capitalism sex worker in a long tradition of Sean Baker anti-heroines dating at least as far back as 2012’s Starlet.  Anora is a thorny, chaotic, unfiltered baddie whom the audience instantly loves for her faults, because she’s fun to be around.  Like in Tangerine & The Florida Project, we meet her working customers in a high-stress but manageable profession, then follow her on an anarchic journey through her larger urban community, walking a tightrope between slapstick physical comedy & face-slap physical violence until she’s offered a moment of grace in the final beat.  As the editor, Baker has worked out a well-timed rhythm for this story template through its many repetitions in previous works.  He sweeps the audience up in the hedonistic romance of Anora’s Vegas-strip marriage to a big-spender Russian brat who offers a Cinderellic escape from the strip club circuit in exchange for helping secure a green card.  The quick-edit montage of that fantasy then slows down to linger on its real-world fallout, investing increasingly long, painful stretches of time on Russian gangsters’ retribution for the young couple generating tabloid headlines that embarrass the brat’s oligarch father.  The laughs continue to roll in, but the punchlines (and physical punches) get more brutal with each impact until it just isn’t fun anymore, as is the Sean Baker way.

There’s nothing especially revelatory about the Sean Baker formula in Anora.  In the context of his filmography, it’s just more of the same (of a very good thing).  However, the increased attention to his career-long project as an auteur has had its immediate benefits, not least of all in Baker’s collaboration with the local repertory series Gap Tooth Cinema (formerly known as Wildwood).  When asked to program a screening for Gap Tooth as a primer for what he was aiming to achieve in Anora, Baker offered three titles as options: Fellini’s Oscar-winning sex worker drama Nights of Cabiria, the fish-out-of-water Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America, and a second Italian sex-work story in 1960’s Adua and Her Friends.  Gap Tooth ultimately selected Adua, the most obscure title of the trio and, more importantly, one of the very best titles they’ve screened to date.  I don’t know that Sean Baker’s name would have come to mind had I discovered Adua and Her Friends in a different context, since it’s a much more formally polished picture than the anarchic comedies he’s become known for since he filmed Tangerine on an iPhone.  The comparisons that more readily came to mind were Mildred Pierce, Volver, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.  It’s a less recognizable title than any of those comparisons, but that’s the only way in which it’s lesser.  It’s an incredibly stylish, sexy, tragic, and cool story of self-reinvented sex workers making do in late-50s Italy, one that speaks well to Baker’s genuine interest in his characters’ inner lives beyond what they symbolize as society’s economic casualties.

Adua and Her Friends is a darkly comic drama about a small crew of sex workers who are forcibly retired by the Merlin Law of 1958, which ceased the legal operation of all Italian brothels.  Unsure how to get by without the only trade they have experience in, the women conspire to open a rural, roadside restaurant as a front for a new, illegal brothel they will run themselves.  Only, after a few successful months of food service—depicted as being equally difficult as prostitution—they decide they’d rather “go straight” in their new business than convert it into an underground brothel.  As you’d expect, the self-reinvented women’s lives as restaurateurs are upended by men from their past that refuse to let them start fresh, the same way Anora is blocked from upgrading her social position from escort to wife.  Where Adua excels is in taking the time to flesh out the inner lives & conflicts of each woman in its main cast.  Lolita is led astray by conmen who take advantage of her youthful naivete; Marilina struggles to reestablish a familial relationship with her estranged son; Milly hopes to leave her past behind and start over as a devoted housewife, Anora-style.  Adua (Oscar-winner Simone Signoret) gets the first & final word in her struggle to establish a new career before she ages out of her livelihood, but the movie is an ensemble-cast melodrama at heart, asking you to love, laugh with, and weep for every woman at the roadside restaurant (and to hiss at the cads who selfishly ruin it all).

Much like in Baker’s films, the majority of Adua and Her Friends is a surprisingly good time, with plenty slapstick gags & irreverently bawdy jokes undercutting the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold tropes typical to this subject.  Like Anora, it’s a 2+ hour comedy with an emotionally devastating ending, one that carefully avoids making its titular sex worker a purely pitiable symbol of societal cruelty even while acknowledging that she’s backed into a pretty shitty corner.  Adua and Anora can be plenty cruel themselves when it helps their day-to-day survival.  That might be where the two films’ overlapping interests end, since Adua lounges in a much more relaxed hangout vibe than Anora, scored by repetitions of Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk” rather than t.A.T.u.’s “All the Things She Said.”  Adua and her friends loiter around their Italian villa, fanning themselves in a deep-focus tableau, while Anora is dragged around Vegas & NYC by Russian mobsters who (for the most part) don’t see her as a human being.  There is one early sequence in Adua where a black-out drunken night is represented in choppy lost-time edits that may have been an influence on the rhythms of Anora’s first act, but otherwise I assume Baker was inspired less by the film’s formal style than he was by the characterizations of its main cast.  The frank, sincere, humanizing approach to sex-worker portraiture in Adua and Her Friends speaks well to Sean Baker’s continued interest in sex-work as a cinematic subject and, although both were great, I feel like I learned more about his work through its presentation than I did by watching his latest film.

 -Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Green Lantern – Beware My Power (2022)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.

Green Lantern: Beware My Power falls squarely in the “solid, but unexceptional” tier of these movies for me. The story is interesting, and it goes out of its way to deliver something different from the films that came before it, making overtures toward space opera as a genre, while also falling back on some old standby narrative elements, like framing the narrative around a central mystery (this time, it’s “What re-ignited the conflict between two worlds brokering an uneasy peace?”) and having a Green Lantern with PTSD serve as the main character. But it also errs on the side of being a bit messy, its moral quandary is muddled, and there’s something amiss in the editing. 

John Stewart (Aldis Hodge and therefore automatically an extra half star) is a veteran of the Iraqi Quagmire struggling to deal with his PTSD now that he’s back in civilian life when a UFO crashes into the junkyard next door. He rescues a small blue alien dude from the wreckage, who speaks to him cryptically before his body self-destructs at the moment he dies, leaving behind a green ring that slips itself onto his finger and starts talking to him. Unable to remove it, he asks the ring if someone could help him understand what’s happening to him, and the ring surrounds him in a protective shield and take him to the JLA’s satellite “Watchtower,” where after a round of extremely typical “misunderstanding means fight” stuff, Green Arrow (Jimmi Simpson) and the newest Green Lantern are off to the GL HQ planet of Oa in the self-repaired crashed ship. Upon arrival, they find the headquarters in ruins and meet Shayera Hol (Jamie Gray Hyder), a warrior of the planet Thanagar, which is populated by winged humanoids. She tells them that the Green Lanterns had helped to create a truce between the Thanagarians and the basically human people of Rann, who were at war with one another. An attempt to build a bridge between their two planets, metaphorically and (using teleportation tech known as “zeta beams”) literally, went awry, putting the two planets right next to each other and wreaking untold havoc on both. Each side blames the other, with good evidence on both fronts, although this turns out to be due to an external party that’s performing false flag efforts on both Rann and Thanagar. Along the way, they pick up Adam Strange (Brian Bloom), a hero of Rann whom even the Thanagarians respect, and who has been presumed dead for years. 

Of course, the villain behind everything is Sinestro. It’s always Sinestro. I got tricked into thinking for a while that this story might go somewhere different, but nope: Sinestro. There does turn out to be another party behind him pulling things from the shadows, but the moment that it was revealed that the Rann/Thanagar beam-bridge thing was sabotaged by Sinestro, I rolled my eyes. (Worse still, upon looking up the movie on Wikipedia to review the cast list, it looks like the film’s poster/DVD cover straight up shows Sinestro; so much for making it a “mystery” at all.) Up to this point, I was willing to forgive a lot of the film’s flaws. A lot of the animation seems a little choppy around the edges, and there’s a distinct feeling that I get that certain frames were extended by fractions of a second, as if they needed just an extra minute and change of runtime in order to meet a contractual obligation and they were going to get those 87 seconds with what was already completed, even if it meant making the time between each character’s lines feel juuuuuuust a teensy bit too long. 

Further, there’s a real “Not all cops” vibe early in the film that I wasn’t a big fan of, and seems particularly tone deaf given the time of release and the film’s main character. After manhandling a guy because he was being an obnoxious jerk while John was having a PTSD flashback, John then comes across two men planning to burn an unhoused guy alive in an alley simply for being there, and he fights them off. The police arrive just as he puts on a few finishing moves and tase him, only letting him go once they run a background check and learn that he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. The whole thing feels weird, out of place, regressive, and apathetic about police brutality. Given that one of the film’s theses revolves around moral justifications for taking a life, it feels weird to include this run-in with the police one of the film’s first scenes. I’m not exaggerating either; the first time that GL and GA meet Shayera, John almost kills her in their fight, as he has her pinned under a mental construct and is in the process of crushing her to death as his ring repeats “Lethal force is not authorized,” over and over again. It’s because of John’s PTSD, of course, as he keeps flashing back to the moment that one of his fellow soldiers was killed next to him, followed by an attack by an enemy combatant who stabs John through his hand in the altercation before John is able to get the upper hand. This gets called back a couple of times, including a scene near the end when the film’s big bad does the same. When the gang manages to rescue the imprisoned Hal Jordan, his old buddy Green Arrow is shocked when the newly freed man kills one of the enemy facility’s guards without hesitation, as Hal says that his experience in Sinestro’s prison has hardened him. Still later, the final villain is defeated when Arrow is forced to kill them, as there’s no other choice. 

Justification for homicide seems like a strange place for these movies to go. I suppose it could be construed as necessary given that our newest Lantern here is a combat veteran, and the fact that John is haunted by the things he saw (and did) in the war makes for a much more complex character than the ones we’ve seen so far in this series. I don’t want to complain about the creative team on this one giving more depth to any of the characters, but it’s definitely a weird choice. A lot of the other choices I really liked, though. Although Unbound spent some time in space aboard Brainiac’s ship and the failed assault on the planet Apokolips obviously launched from space, it’s surprising that it’s taken over forty of these movies to make a proper, space-set sci-fi story (it also took them more than forty of these before they made one with a Black lead, it should be mentioned). The influences from Star Wars are all over. The Green Lanterns’ powers are given elements of The Force here (during a long interstellar trip, John even practices his use of his new powers with the ring like Luke does aboard the Millennium Falcon). There’s a dark, corrupting influence that causes the moral fall of the greatest and most respected member of an intergalactic peace-keeping order, and the fall of that order leaves only one last Jedi Green Lantern, one free of the influence of previous generations. Hal Jordan’s prison beard even makes him look almost exactly like prequel Obi-Wan. If you’re going to borrow (or steal), do it from the best, I suppose. 

From a production perspective, this one is a little sloppy, but I’ve finally gotten used to the animation style, so it’s not intolerable. Narratively, it’s a refreshing change of pace to get out and do some space stuff, since the last time we did anything close to this scale was in Emerald Knights, which was over thirty movies ago. Characterwise, the choices they made about John Stewart’s past are an interesting wrinkle that delivers more pathos than normal, and his interactions with Green Arrow are a lot of fun. I love Aldis Hodge, so that’s a plus. Still, this one gets a “Solid, But Unexceptional.” 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #225: The Gleaners and I (2000) & Varda Docs

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Welcome to Episode #225 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, and Brandon discuss a grab bag of self-reflective documentaries directed by Agnès Varda, starting with her dumpster-diving doc The Gleaners and I (2000).

00:00 Welcome

01:20 The Company of Strangers (1990)
05:21 Adua and Her Friends (1960)
10:39 Corrina, Corrina (1994)

14:44 The Gleaners and I (2000)
32:25 Jane B for Agnès V (1988)
44:52 The Beaches of Agnès (2008)
54:26 Faces Places (2017)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

The Phantom of the Opera (1989)

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I know it’s gauche to discuss a movie’s marketing instead of its content, but the 1989 adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera is an especially peculiar case.  Clearly, the best way to sell the film would be to piggyback off star Robert Englund’s success in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, especially since Freddy Kreuger’s make-up designer Kevin Yagher tagged along to apply the exact same make-up to this public-domain franchise.  The video store poster for The Phantom of the Opera tiptoes as close as it can to declaring “Freddy Kreuger is the Phantom of the Opera” without getting sued by New Line.  It’s not exactly false advertising, either.  The entire Phantom story is told as one long dream-sequence journey into the past, where a wisecracking Englund in the gooey Freddy makeup slashes down every fool who gets in the way of the young ingenue he wants to transform into an opera star.  What that premise doesn’t convey is that the film also adopts a romantic stage-theatre tone, playing like a throwback to classic Hammer Horror (or, at times, Masterpiece Theatre) that offers a classier, more literary take on the genre.  That’s the version of Phantom of the Opera you were sold if you happen to catch the film’s trailer, which shows you all of the period-piece tragic romance of the plot with none of the flayed-alive gorehound grue that frequently interrupts it. 

Setting up a modern-day sequel that never came to be (The Phantom of the Opera 2: Terror in Manhattan), our story starts in 1980s New York City, where The Stepfather‘s Jill Schoelen is auditioning to become a professional opera singer.  There’s a stage prop accident during her audition that smashes her into a mirror realm so, naturally, she travels back in time to a past life in 19th Century London, again working as a hopeful opera singer.  Only, the past version of herself is supported by a mysterious benefactor who skulks around the rafters and dungeons of the theatre, acting as her “angel” (through mentorship and murder) but carefully staying out of the spotlight.  According to the title, Englund is strictly playing the Phantom of the Opera here, but his character details are a hodgepodge amalgamation of the Phantom, Faust, Jack the Ripper and, of course, Freddy Kreuger.  The theatrical setting offers the film a classy surface aesthetic, like a straight-to-video version of Argento’s Opera.  The Phantom’s quipping & mugging in the extreme-gore kill scenes drags it back down to the base pleasures of a by-the-numbers slasher, though, which is a fun contrast to the stately background setting.  Then, when the story eventually smashes back through the looking glass to modern-day New York, bringing along Phantom Freddy with it, it’s even more fun to briefly see that dynamic flipped.

I always got the sense that Robert Englund never wanted to be fully pigeonholed as a Horror Guy, much less as Freddy Kreuger.  If nothing else, he commiserates with fellow reluctant-horror-icon Wes Craven over that professional disappointment in A New Nightmare, where the actor & director find a way to flex their more erudite offscreen personae under the Freddy Kreuger brand.  In The Phantom of the Opera, he’s clearly attempting to stray from the Freddy Krueger schtick into something more literary, but the furthest away he was allowed to get was emulating Vincent Price in The Abominable Dr. Phibes.  It doesn’t help that he’s wearing the Freddy makeup beneath his Phantom mask, which is stitched together from harvested patches of discolored human flesh.  That dual make-up layering is mirrored in the film’s double-exposure imagery during more surreal moments where the story travels time, echoes Faust, or underlines the Phantom’s extraordinary powers as a supernatural killer.  So much of the Phantom plays like a standard BBC adaptation of a literary classic that it’s shocking when an especially beautiful or grotesque image punches through: a vibrant shock of red fabric, a flayed man transformed into a human puppet, the Phantom posed in Mario Bava color-gel artifice, etc.  It may not be the career turn that Englund was hoping for, but it does offer a lovely, volatile contrast between the career he wished he had and the career he actually had, violently juxtaposed in real time.

-Brandon Ledet

Gamera’s 90s Makeover

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All you really need to earn respectability in the entertainment industry is to stick around long enough for the bad reviews to fade away and your presence is undeniable. It worked for Keanu Reeves, it worked for Adam Sandler, and it also worked for the fire-breathing turtle monster Gamera.  When Gamera first premiered in the 1960s, the giant turtle beast was essentially a goofy knockoff of Godzilla, and he was treated as such.  As a result, he quickly pivoted to become a “hero to children everywhere” in a long string of kiddie sequels (before Godzilla also got into that game), so that the original Daikaijū Gamera film was never treated with the same critical or historical respect as the original Gojira.  We all love Earth’s hard-shelled protector anyway, though, so it’s good to know that Gamera did eventually get his deserved victory lap in the 1990s, when he was given a slick, big-budget makeover to help boost his reputation as one of the kaiju greats.  I haven’t yet seen all of Gamera’s kid-friendly sequels from the 1960s & 70s, but I can’t imagine any could compare with his action-blockbuster spectacles from the 1990s.  Gamera’s Heisei-era trilogy is a glorious run of high-style, high-energy kaiju pictures that for once genuinely compete with the best of the Godzilla series, instead of registering as a court jester pretender to the King of Monsters’ throne.

The debut of that 90s makeover, 1995’s Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, is both the best and the most faithful of the trilogy.  Gamera is re-introduced to the world as a living relic of Atlantis, not a newly arrived extraterrestrial protector.  He battles the Giant Claw-like bird creatures the Gyaos from his 1960s days, who are theorized to have been activated by Climate Change, and his ability to fight them off is powered by a child’s love.  Just in case audiences weren’t sure that this straightforward Gamera revival was inspired by the success of Jurassic Park, Guardian of the Universe almost immediately includes an archeological dig and a scene where the scientist studying the Gyaos shoves an entire arm into their droppings like Laura Dern going shoulder deep in triceratops poop.  It’s the Jurassic Park style mixed-media approach to the visual effects that really makes this one stand out, since the plot and the monster-of-the-week enemies are such classic Gamera fare.  There’s something gorgeous about the film’s 90s green screen magic, surveillance video inserts, and rudimentary CGI mixing with the rubber monster suit tactility of classic kaiju pictures that inspires awe in this reputation-rehabilitator.  We are all Sam Neill gazing upwards, slack-jawed at our giant reptile friend and, then, begging the Japanese military to stop shooting at him so he can save the day.  Every time Gamera bleeds green ooze in his fight to save us, we too ooze a tear in solidarity.

Things turn more horrific in the 1996 sequel Gamera 2: Attack of Legion, shifting from Jurassic Park to Mimic in Hollywood comparison terms.  Instead of fighting off the Gyaos sky-beasts, Gamera has to face underground bug creatures collectively called Legion.  As a threat, Legion can be genuinely unnerving in their Phase IV-style insectoid organization skills, at one point carpeting Gamera’s entire body in a collective swarm.  In individual design, they’re a touch creepier than the Arachnids from Starship Troopers, adding a gross little cyclops eyeball to the center of each bug’s frame.  All we can do in the face of such horrors is to thank Gamera for sticking around to protect us . . . unless you happen to be one of the poor children orphaned by the large-scale destruction of his skyscraper heroism.  Gamera’s enemy in the third installment, 1999’s Revenge of Iris, is the titular parasitic monster that has been orphaned by the turtle’s heroic violence, birthed from a loan surviving egg seemingly borrowed from the set of an Alien sequel.  Really, though, Gamera has to contend with the disaffected child psychically linked to that monster, who lost her parents when Gamera crushed their apartment during a Legion attack in the previous picture.  It’s a plot that questions whether the widespread collateral damage of Gamera’s heroism is worth having him around to fight off lesser monsters, to the point where he has to fight a personified version of the Trauma he’s caused in past battles. We all still love the big guy, but accountability is important.

Of the two sequels, Revenge of Iris is the only true contender for possibly besting Guardian of the Universe as the best of Gamera’s 90s run.  By that point in the series, Gamera’s reputation as something too goofy to take seriously had been fully overcome, so there was only one goal left to achieve: make Gamera scary.  It’s an incredible accomplishment, achieved by filming the giant turtle beast from inside the homes he’s supposedly protecting with his righteous, vengeful violence.  There’s a somber, funereal tone to Revenge of Iris, as if it were clear to the filmmakers that Gamera’s 90s revival was a special moment in time that had already reached its natural conclusion.  Images of dead Gyaos covered in flies and a sea floor carpeted in dead Gameras from Atlantis’s ancient past convey a sad finality to the series echoed in Gamera’s “What have I done?” moment self-reflection when he realizes he has traumatized the very children he sought to protect.  Personally, I was much more impressed & delighted by the spectacle of Gamera’s official makeover in Guardian of the Universe, but the tonal & thematic accomplishments in Revenge of Iris are just as remarkable, considering the monster’s humble origins three decades earlier.  Attack of Legion is a worthy bridge between those two franchise pillars as well, especially on the strength of its creepy creature designs.  Gamera may not have emerged from his 90s run as a hero to all children everywhere, but he carved out an even bigger place for himself in this overgrown child’s heart.  I love my giant turtle friend, and I’m happy that he eventually found the respect he’s always deserved.

-Brandon Ledet